Kathy Mattea

OR someone who started out as a bluegrass singer/ songwriter, seriously - flirted with folk, and committed virtual career suicide by releasing an album (1991's Time Passes By) that successfully blended contemporary country with - Scottish folk influences, Kathy Mattea has certainly not distanced herself from her original fanbase. There was "little" space in Whelans to move around, the capital's country music contingent only too eager to see the debut gig in Dublin of one of Nashville's most assured female singers.

Mattea scored the biggest applause of the night when she sang the song that effectively - kick started her commercial career - Nanci Griffith's Love At The Five And Dime. She dotted some of her best known songs around a core set that concentrated on tracks from her latest album. The "hits" strategy included the superb Where've You Been, a poignant song written by her husband, Jon Vezner, that retells the relationship between his parents from courtship to old age, and which was beautifully phrased, and charged with a powerful delivery that seems to come naturally. Mattea fully realised what many other country singers have trouble getting to grips with the rewarding marriage of credibility and commerce.

Her new album, Love Travels, is best defined by what it isn't (not folk, not country cute, not a dreaded mix of Las Vegas and Nashville). Even more in a live performance, she sings its tracks as if they were her own, so the lyrics of among others, Gillian Welch, Jim Lauderdale, and Cheryl Wheeler tend to define Mattea herself. And that definition is? A fine interpretative country singer with enough presence to offset any criticism regarding her singular slant on country music.